“Do you believe in miracles, Mum?”
“Of course. We are all miracles, walking, breathing, loving miracles. Don’t you?”
“Yes. I believe in miracles, too.”
After several minutes we return to the warmth of her room.
The stable door creaks behind me, where the Drill Sergeant stands and watches me work. “How you making out in here? Almost done, I see. Good.”
“No thanks to you.” Lazy, no good, chauvinistic jerk Neanderthal.
It has taken me nearly five hours to clean the stable. He didn’t lift a finger other than to hand me a shovel. He is a jerk of elephant proportions, and I don’t want to work with him. He has no personality to speak of, and and manners are as foreign to him as his accent is to me.
My new gloves are no longer butter yellow, they are black, wet, and have lost their shape. What’s worse is that they won’t even stay on my hands. I had to resort to picking up balls of dung by hand and lobbing them into the back of Harrison in an effort to save my back from the weight of the shovel. Underneath, my hands that these gloves were meant to protect are badly calloused and blistered. The inside of my thumbs are raw where several layers of skin have been rubbed off, and the mere touch of the gloves on my skin is excruciating. My shoes, socks, and clothes are soaked in sweat and elephant piss, and our workday isn’t even half over yet.
“I’ll go dump this, and when I come back we need to load eight bails of Lucerne into the back of the truck,” the Drill Sergeant says.
“What’s the Lucerne for?” I thought it was just for these filthy elephants.
“Drought has dried up most of their food source, so we subsidize the diets of the big animals. After that, we’ll go and feed the cats.”
“Cats?”
“Lions.”
“What do the lions eat?”
“Meat.”
Hopefully they only like lean meat and not the fatty, blonde city variety.
The Drill Sergeant returns a few minutes later and says he’ll meet me in the store room just now to load the Lucerne, but it’s no surprise that he is nowhere to be found again.
I eagerly begin to carry a bail of Lucerne out to the truck. Each bail weighs sixty pounds, but feels twice its weight. The heavy-duty plastic string binding each bail cuts through my gloves, rendering them useless.
Unable to take full steps, I shuffle outside dragging the bail. Once outside, I try to toss it into the truck, but it’s hopeless. It bounces off the tailgate, back onto me, and knocks me onto my butt. My new Big Five Volunteer t-shirt I’m proudly wearing is covered in this sticky grass. It’s actually weaved itself right into the fabric of my shirt, itching and scratching my skin underneath. The day can’t possibly get any worse.
I look around, hoping that the Drill Sergeant hasn’t just seen what I’ve done and, thankfully, he’s out of sight—likely having another smoke while I do the heavy work. I try once more to toss it up, swinging it backwards first to gain momentum, and then lob it up with all my strength, but again it bounces off the side of the truck.
Mumbling obscenities, I return to the storeroom and shuffle out with another bail. Before I even reach the truck, I trip on what appears to be a hardened piece of elephant dung. I don’t have time to put my hands out in front of me because these stupid, useless gloves are stuck in this stupid bail that has now fallen apart because I fell onto it. The Drill Sergeant arrives and graces me with a disapproving look. He picks up two bails at a time and lobs them into the truck with ease. He’s not even wearing gloves, and there isn’t a shred of grass stuck to his shirt. I don’t think I could possibly dislike a person any more than I dislike him right now.
“Take lunch. I’ll pick you up in thirty minutes,” he barks.
This has been the crappiest Monday morning of all time.
7
Circle of Life
Lunch is a chocolate bar and hot tea while I bake my shoes and gloves in the oven at 400 degrees, trying to dry them out.
The Drill Sergeant arrives as I’m getting back into my shoes. “Get in the back of the truck.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re going to distribute the Lucerne.”
It sounds like a luxurious task after shoveling ellie shit all morning and shredding my hands. And what a bonus, I don’t have to sit beside him. I climb into the back of Harrison, making a seat out of a bail. As we exit the gate, Kittibon decides it would be great sport to block the road. The Drill Sergeant honks the horn, but she doesn’t move.
He shouts out the window. “Hold on!”
I have a death grip on the rim of the bed as he veers off the road and through a gully to get around her. She reaches her trunk into the back of the truck to steal some Lucerne, but she’s not fast enough.
“Ha ha! Nice try, cow!”
The Drill Sergeant hollers back at me. “Don’t harass her. Elephants never forget. She’ll get revenge if you piss her off. Kitty always does.”
Not if I can help it.
On the edge of camp stands the lonely Bonty, looking out over the fence into the open reserve, watching and waiting, as usual.
“Helllllooooooo, Bonty!” I yell. “You are not alone,” I whisper under my breath as we pass him.
He seems to look at me as though he knows exactly what I said.
After several minutes of driving over rocky makeshift roads, the Drill Sergeant pulls off the road, slowing Harrison to a stop. “Get a bail ready,” he shouts.
I look around, there’s nothing but scrub brush. Nevertheless, I remove the string and jump down from the truck.
Within seconds, out of the brush, making his way towards us is a giant African buffalo. His horns are massive, and he’s coming quickly towards the truck. I start throwing grass towards him, and soon one after another, several buffalo are trotting out from the brush, all heading straight towards us. I pull apart the grass as fast as I can to disperse it before they arrive. They’re thundering toward us at full speed. I stand tall, awaiting our first meeting.
“Get in the truck!” the Drill Sergeant barks, through puffs of his cigarette.
“I don’t want to get in the truck. I want to watch them eat from here.” I’ve had just about enough of his orders for today.
“That bull will pulverize you into the ground with his head in about twenty seconds,” he says with indifference, not even a hint of concern in his voice. Instead, his tone implies that it would be an inconvenience for him to have to clean up my pulverized remains.
I get up in the truck just as they arrive. They eat like wild pigs, snorting and grunting, tossing grass everywhere. I imagine this is what the Drill Sergeant looks like when he eats.
“Buffalo kill more people every year than all of the Big Five combined. Never underestimate the rage of a buffalo.”
We leave them to eat, and carry on with our patrol. Soon, we encounter the mother rhinoceros and her baby. The baby is named Habiby—Arabic for “darling.”
“Why has her horn been cut down?”
“She has been fighting with the male so much since the baby was born that it cracked. To save it, we had to cut it down to half size.”
“Why is she fighting with the male?”
“Typical female behavior, really. She won’t let him near her since she gave birth a year ago, and if he tries to come around, she beats the crap out of him.”
“That is not typical female behavior.”
“Mother Nature reflects human behavior. Anyway, it’s most likely the root cause for the male’s aggression, and why he’s undergoing hormone therapy—lack of love and affection.”
“Are the hormones working?”
He nods uneasily. “For his aggression, but not so much for his manhood. He still has random acts of aggression, but he’s getting soft and sensitive. The female is getting more vicious now that she sees he’s getting soft—again, typical female behavior.”